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theodp writes "CNET takes a look at Web browsers you can run inside of the latest video games, offering mini-reviews of PlayXpert, Steam, Rogue, and Xfire. Why run these instead of your standard browser? Well, these browsers run lean and mean, play nice with full-screen apps, provide hot keys that can make them appear or disappear in an instant, and offer transparency so you can continue to play a game in full screen while chatting, reading e-mail or looking up cheat codes. So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?"

Now that AIGLX lets you run any window as an OpenGL mesh and texture, it's not a stretch to map that into a surface in your game. But it would require some cooperation from the game itself, since it has to take a reasonable place in the OpenGL command pipeline unless you just want it hovering over everything.

For quite some time now you've been able to bring up FireFox inside of Everquest 2 (they have the files inside a sub-dir of the EQ2 directory, so it's a "private" copy of it, not accessing what you already have installed). They mainly did it because they were overhauling their in-game support page (reporting bugs, etc) to a normal web page instead of a one-off interface window specific to the game, but I guess somebody finally had a brain and said "hey, let's just let the players use this as a regular brow

These new in-game browsers are great! I used to be annoyed that I'd have to hit Alt AND F4 to switch away from my game to check my stock prices, but now with these new in-game browsers I can simply hit Shift+F4 and browse at my leisure.

This is a huge step forward in usability. I can't wait until Emacs includes a browser that can be toggled with an intuitive set of keystrokes.

Its actually quite scary. I was on the bus this morning on my way to work when I look out the window at a women driving. She is completely beyond reality and roughly 2 car lengths from the nearest car, fumbling for gloves that she clearly needs right that moment, then lipstick. I was genuinely boggled when she pulled out a nail file and started working on her nails. All the while, oblivious to the cars around her.

I commute long distances upstate and in NYC very often by car, here's some of the oddities I've encountered on the road:

- dozens of guys shaving with a portable electric razor while driving- people reading books when stopped at a red light...never heard of audio books you idiots?- people eating food...but with a plastic forks and knives out of containers at red lights- several cab drivers drinking beer while driving...- a guy swerving through traffic as his dog climbed under the pedals once...

So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?

I hope that we never see this. Not as long as there's a human steering the car. Do we really need yet ANOTHER distraction from driving? People are texting, putting on makeup, calling, eating, drinking, reading and doing too many other things than driving. Imho if a police should see you doing this they should sell your car and take your license since you're too stupid to figure out that 3000kg at 100km/h is a force to be respected.

So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?

I hope that we never see this. Not as long as there's a human steering the car. Do we really need yet ANOTHER distraction from driving? People are texting, putting on makeup, calling, eating, drinking, reading and doing too many other things than driving. Imho if a police should see you doing this they should sell your car and take your license since you're too stupid to figure out that 3000kg at 100km/h is a force to be respected.

The funny thing is that people are far more likely to "pull over and chat" in an FPS (where they can respawn) than in a real car (where they can't).

So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?

I hope that we never see this. Not as long as there's a human steering the car. Do we really need yet ANOTHER distraction from driving? People are texting, putting on makeup, calling, eating, drinking, reading and doing too many other things than driving. Imho if a police should see you doing this they should sell your car and take your license since you're too stupid to figure out that 3000kg at 100km/h is a force to be

It may be arrogance, or ignorance, but it's a matter of judgement on whether or not the area was safe and if you had the ability to do it.

You're fine doing all those things, until one day you discover something you're not fine with, or some jackass pulls out in front of you and your reaction time is slower because you're distracted. Then it's all fun and games.

Still, I guess some people never make it beyond toddlers. You've just gotta touch that hotplate before you figure out it's dangerous.

When I was in college, I used to eat subs, eye drops in my eye, splash cold water on my face (long drives), take off a jacket, even pull off a pullover while driving. Once, I even had a plate of spaghetti on my lap.

So what do you think would happen if a ball rolled out into the street in front of your car, followed by a laughing child?

You were a complete asshole when you drove like that. I hope you've wised up, but it sounds like you still think your masterful driving expertise allows you to control things outside your card.

Freeways aren't always in the middle of nowhere. A freeway might have things near it like a MacDonalds with a playcenter, parks, etc. Also it doesn't have to be a child. There are wildlife you have to consider. Hitting a deer might be bad. Hitting a moose may be fatal.

What abone the blonde bimbo, doing the same thing as you with the eye drops, who slams her brakes on after spotting a squirrel. You don't notice her brake lights as you've eating a plate of spaghetti on your lap. You might have dropped the fork into the footwell.

Actually, perhaps we should pray that this kind of thing happens more often. The blonde in the SUV takes minor scratches, maybe some glass in her face in some kind of poetic justice for her outrageous vanity. You, on the other hand, can be left in

I'd be wondering why a child was playing on the freeway in the middle of nowhere.

Only partly right. First you'd kill the child. Then you'd wonder why she was playing on the freeway. Then you'd blame the child for the "accident", because clearly from your point of view, she's the one at fault.

I'll take my jacket off while driving. But if I don't do anything other than drive when I'm in a place where things can come from the side of the road without me seeing. But that's not every road. There are lots of high-traffic areas that are simply not accessible at all, or very rarely accessed by pedestrians. If you're eating and putting in eye drops while driving in Manhattan, I'd backhand you. Doing it while driving through the deserts in bumfuck, Utah without another car around for 50 miles? Not so muc

The speed limit is set low in this country because we believe it is more important that a driver can parallel park that is that a driver know and obey the rules of the road. It's a trade off. I don't think people in the US would tolerate the German system of driver licensing and highway enforcement even if speed limits were done the same. They get to drive fast, we get to eat entire meals in the car, and drive in the rain without the headlights being on.

I may have been trolled, but I've seen enough of this kind of shitty driving in real life--including the horrible consequences such as dead children who won't be having an open casket funeral--and enough 100% insane jerks trying to justify their terrible driving that I doubt it.

This, quite frankly, is exactly the kind of behavior and attitude that causes the majority of traffic accidents in the US.

Now, I'm not afraid to admit, I drive fast sometimes. But I always try to pay attention and be aware of my surroundings, whether I'm driving slow or fast. The few times I've been caught speeding it's been because I was too intent on watching my surroundings and didn't have my eyes glued to my speedometer (in fact, that's the main reason I hate speed limits - because watching the speedome

it's a matter of judgement on whether or not the area was safe and if you had the ability to do it.

If I remember the statistics correctly, 80% of people think that they drive better than they actually do ("driving better" here specifically means reaction time and the general ability to evade accidents).

So wait... Are you saying that it should be OK for you to drive however you want because it's your car? That the government fascists are imposing on you for dictating that you actually pay attention when in control of 2000 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic moving 60-70 miles per hour? I do believe that this might be the worst personal freedom argument I've seen.

So because it's your car you could, say, drive on my lawn? On the sidewalks? Hint: it may be your car, but they aren't your roads. You might call them "your" roads, because your tax/toll money went toward them, but they're not your private property like your car is. They're a common good. So it's perfectly legitimate for the public to appoint a government that limits behavior on them. There's a more abstract common good, however, than just the physical road surface: it's the ability for people to get

The government has a responsibility to limit potential harm, not just direct harm. As sibling points out, driving while distracted significantly increases the risk that you will harm someone. No, you won't get in an accident every time you text while driving, but texting while driving significantly increases you risk of an accident. Since that accident will likely cause harm to someone else (either financial or medical), the government tries to limit the risky behavior. There is no similar law about tex

At least the EVE in-game browser doesn't support JavaScript or Flash, and therefore most obnoxious advertisments won't be an issue. Images in HTML are fairly benign, and as long as they don't simply create table cell after table cell filled with "OMG U R WINNAR!!1" and "Get ringtones here!" images with no content in between, it won't be an issue.

All it does is encourage people to multi-task more. And that is not a good thing. Our brain isn't good at multi-tasking (in terms of focusing on different things), we end up doing each job half-assed. And have a big switch when we go from one to the other. It is like a drug though because we use so much extra brain power multi-tasking we feel like we are being more productive however you are better off doing job 1 then job 2 in order. With this happening more we are training our kids not to sit down and solve a problem but jump back and forth until until we fail at all of them.

All it does is encourage people to multi-task more. And that is not a good thing. Our brain isn't good at multi-tasking (in terms of focusing on different things), we end up doing each job half-assed.

The more you multi-task, the better you get at it - at minimum, you get better at combining the tasks that you regularly combine.

With this happening more we are training our kids not to sit down and solve a problem but jump back and forth until until we fail at all of them.

Growing up with a slow modem and a multitasking computer (1200 bps BSR modem, Amiga 500) I definitely learned to multitask. I find that I am better at it than my parents. Perhaps it's a good thing. Besides, there will always be those among us who enter a nerdly fugue state and tune out the rest of existence. And isn't Autism on the rise? Perhaps humanity is segmenting:)

Multitasking is not downloading a Program for 1 hour and doing something else while it is loading. (It is computer multitasking but not human multi-tasking). I remember when I installed Slackware My order for each module was well planned out I get the Core then Network first Install though then I boot into Slackware then Get the Games. Install the games module. Then I download the rest while I pay lasteroids.

Steam seems to still use Internet Explorer for some things. I removed IE with nLite and can easily see where Steam tries to use it. TF2 also has major problems and it forces the game to minimise and presents a dialogue asking me if I want to download an html file, it then takes 20 seconds to get back into the game. I wish there was some way to stop TF2 from making any attempts to use a browser, but I haven't found one yet.

Totally with you. The world wide web is a terribly hostile place at this point. We've got so many tpyo squattres (that was deliberate), and legit but hacked web sites delivering malware/spyware, and so many idiots who really think some Nigerian interior minister is seeking their help that I predict EPIC FAILURE.

"...So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?"

Are you serious? We can't even keep people from crashing at 80MPH and killing innocent people because they're too busy texting on a 2x2" screen on a fucking cell phone, and you want to slap a full-blown YouTube/Facebook/Myspace portal on the windshield?

I'll tell you how much longer. When we have a foolproof autopilot system for our cars.

Many cities are putting in a light rail system. The problem is that rail is great for moving large loads, not so much for getting someone to even within a mile or two of their destination. Gotta have something to cover that gap.

Oh yeah it looks like they tested it using a site with Flash and then complained when the website performance was horrible. Even the Chrome team said they can't do anything about poor Flash performance (relatively speaking to the rest of Chrome).

And maybe someday we will have games that run in resizable areas that take less than the full screen, so that one can run any arbitrary application (or even applications!) in the remaining space. Wow! Wouldn't that be something!

If you're just looking for something to look up info there is no need for a browser in WoW.

Install the Questhelper and lightheaded addons and you're all set.

Questhelper points you to the quest locations and lightheaded parses all comments from wowhead on quests in a ingame addon.

Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram. I'm glad you mention wowhead, which the GP should be using instead of thotbot. I think a good solution is cartographer and playing the game in windowed (but maximized) mode. In windowed mode, alt tabbing out is instant instead of incurring the 2 second delay of full screen. Of course, windowed mode incurs a performance penalty too, but it's less than QH and it can easily be turned off when not in need of constant reference material.

Actually, I find that trying Questhelper has pretty much killed all my interest in WoW.

Now I do appreciate having Thottbot or such, for when I got lost or couldn't figure out the directions after trying for half an hour. But just following the cube makes me feel like a bot could do the same thing, and probably better. There is no need for any more complex thought above "click on that guy because Questhelper says so" or "head that way because Questhelper says so." There's nothing left to discover (technically QH discovered it already for you), nothing worth remembering (QH already tells you whether you need to go east or west, so no point in even trying to remember where the quest told you to go), you don't even need to look at the major landmarks (if it's behind that hill, QH will tell you so.)

And you can tell. I know people who play exclusively by Questhelper (heck, mom does) and frankly, they don't seem to actually use any brainpower in playing the game. Often they won't even remember what they just did or where some major landmark is, because really there was no more thought involved than obediently doing what the bot told them to. They've run along some road a dozen times, but ask them to show you where it is, and you find that they couldn't find their own arse with a map and a compass, but without QH. Or you see them forgetting they had to use some unique item, and some whole group trying to take down some elite boss the hard way instead, because none of them bothered even reading the quest text and QH doesn't tell them, "dude, use the shreder".

Now if that still keeps you entertained, good for you, and I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But it's just not for me. For me it makes the whole thing boring as heck, and takes away any kind of sense of achievement too.

That's because quest helper is for vet players who have done 90% of the low-level content umpteen bazillion times and just want to get their alt leveled. And it's just not possible to remember every detail of every quest no matter how many times you do it. But at the same time, there's also no way they're going to be in any way new and interesting, so you just want to get them done as soon as possible. But imagining using it to level my first character, I agree with you 100%. I probably would never have hit

Exactly, which I agree is a sad state of affairs. When I started playing, no such mods existed. You could find most everything on thottbot already thanks to beta testers, but being told where something is and then finding it is a big big difference from having a bot holding your hand every step of the way. There's very few sections of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor that I didn't become quite familiar with.

I spent a whole year and three months levelling my first character to 70 all on my own, no guildies, no friends, just myself.

Afterwards for my alts I used Questhelper. I had already done those quests and I did not feel like wandering around for hours trying to remember each location, mob and detail. Questhelper enabled me to level up those alts quickly.

Besides, the best part of the game is the end-game raiding, and Questhelper has nothing to do with that.

But you still have to exercise at least _some_ (minimal) brain cells, e.g., to read the quest descriptions, use the map, and figure out stuff like "oh, it said go south at the crossroads" or "wait, these are not the kinds of satyrs the quest wanted." Not IQ-test grade by any means, but there's _some_ brain activity involved.

"I've played the game way too long to care about the quests that I have to grind to get to my desired level.

Then quit playing. It is obviously not fun for you anymore and something you regard as a chore. Remember, this is a game and games are supposed to be entertaining. (This is exactly why I don't play any MMORPG anymore. They are all like this to me.)

Hilarious. When you rate a players skill at the game it is usually in pvp or a raid setting. QH will effect none of your abilities to perform in this department. Lore... Wow lore is a joke, its a hodge podge of popular culture (i like this) with a bunch of stuff tacked on from warcraft 3. There really was no lore in war1 or 2... just some vague generic stories in the instruction manual. Pretty much all the chars were added in from war3. If you've played war3, you know the story.

Isn't the point that the admin could use IE as a malware vector? For example, force the player's computer to open http://www.malware.com/ieexploit.html [malware.com], which then uses one of the many IE bugs to install a trojan? This also applies to the MOTD feature. Because Mani is a server-side feature, you are forced to trust the admin not to do this.

Even if you can trust the admin (and trusting him not to crack your computer is not the same as trusting him not to cheat), you can't necessarily be sure that the server i

Well, considering that a full-screen browser display on the windshield of your car would be distracting enough to require the car to steer itself, I'm gonna go with the self-steering car as being the closest to reality. Not to mention the fact that there's places where such technology has already been successfully used, [timesonline.co.uk] on existing highways. [physorg.com] Never heard of a full-screen HUD-on-the-windshield web browser though.